Sui Generis
by charmingly-holly
Summary: Sui Generis, Latin: of his, her, its, or their own kind: unique. People say that it's the Slytherins' endless ambition that gets them in so much trouble. Right now, these four Slytherins' greatest ambition is to stay alive. Trouble doesn't worry them much
1. Prologue: Circus

**A/N: Alright. I have to take a deep breath because this has been coming for a little over a year now, but still I am a bit freaked out about it...**

**I'm writing a Slytherin fic. It won't be particularly humorous. Knowing me, I'm sure a few things will slip in here and there but...this is not a humor story. It's more like a character analysis. Only with a bit more umph. And, perhaps strangest of all...romance isn't going to be the main focus. Again, knowing me, there will be a few here and theres but...for the most part? Not what this is about. So that begs the question, what is this about exactly?**

**To be honest, I haven't the foggiest. I just know that the idea entered my brain, rattled around until I was forced to write some of it out...and now it refuses to leave. Keeps building on itself. So far I have the first four or five chapters written. I like them. **

**All that said, know this...this story is unfinished. I don't know if it will be finished. Generally I don't allow myself to post anything that I'm not positive I'll finish up on this site, but...well, with the last book so soon to coming out and probably slaughtering the canon of this story to bits...well, I figured get it out now, and hope for the best :P**

**To all Slytherin fic lovers...well, I hope I don't fail you too spectacularly. I'm not an expert at this sort of fic, so bear with me please.**

**To all my returning readers hoping for another crazy, humorous, Harry/Ginny ridiculous story revolving around dairy products...well, give it a chance yeah? You may surprise yourself. I know I did when I read my first Slytherin fic...**

**Perhaps this is the start of another great journey in the world of fanfiction...perhaps it isn't. All I know is this Prologue is very unconventional. You may hate it, you may love it, you may just say "What the bloody fuck?" but just know that if you don't understand what's going on yet...you're normal.**

**Try it out? Perhaps review? You all rock a lot...**

**-h**

**PS: My God, I must be mad to be doing this... **

**Disclaimer: No.**

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**Sui Generis  
A Slytherin Fic **

For that wiley din  
Who've never been  
Quite above sin  
Oh please let's examine  
The lovely Slytherins!

**Prologue: Circus **  
_  
Scene 1. The House of Mirrors, to the left just inside a striped, faded circus tent which has the feeling of abandonment despite the fact the poster on the side declares a show beginning that very date and time. Dirt, grime, sticky splashes of spilled soda drinks, smears of animal excrement and reeking stains of day-old vomit discolor the tent like blood stains on a butcher's apron. The floor is dirty. Giant trailers with colorful scenes painted on the outside loom around the circus tent like the empty carcasses of long dead dinosaurs. They collect grime. The colors are muted. Mud is splattered against their sides like coffee stains down crisp white blouses, down yellow blouses, down blue blouses, down crimson blouses, down green blouses. _

_--Unicorn blood staining a green blouse. A green silk blouse. Its reflection is fleeting in the mirror. She wants to cry out but a hand touches her throat beneath her chin and she can't because there is nothing there for her--_

_There is nothing here for you._

_There is nothing here for us._

_There is nothing he—_

The Author's fingers freeze abruptly, hovering above the keys like a spider's legs as it lowers itself to its delicate web. It is as if the room has instantly become vacuum sealed in the silence following the clacking of the typewriter keys.

There is silence.

There is only _Silence_. _It stretches on like infinity trapped in a glass bottle. A green glass bottle. A muted green glass bottle with a cork stuffed in the top like a dirty rag shoved down a Ringleader's throat._

_--We will shove a dirty rag down your throat and watch you die. We will shove ten thousand dirty, soiled rags down your throat for every piece of innocence you have taken from us and watch you die. Slowly die. Slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly die like a mosquito trapped in warm resin. We will shove you into infinity, into the muted green glass bottle, like a mosquito trapped in warm resin; we will force you into the opening and watch you struggle to breathe, struggle to keep burning black without oxygen to feed your flame. We will--_

_The flap to the circus tent is visible only by the small sliver of black towards the bottom of it, indicating an opening. From behind an empty traitor the Spectator emerges and pauses outside the sliver._

The Author pauses again. Her head hurts. She can't feel her eyes.

She closes them. She rubs her hands across her face. She presses against her numb eyes. She can't do this.

Her back is aching. Pictures are flashing through her brain like soot-stained trees passing by a train window, like soot-stained faces staring out the windows of a passing train; like the blackened bottoms of the children's soot-stained feet on the cobbled street as they skittered into alleyways when the rumbling started.

When the rumbling started.

When the Unfolding started.

She was so confused when the Unfolding started. She was so confused after the Unfolding started. She was going to write _Scene 1: The Stage is empty, but for a sign in the corner, large, made of rotting wood, painted letters in crimson. It says, All is not lost._

_All is not lost, it says, all is not _as it seems

The Spectator realizes this from his place in the audience, from his place among the wan faces like so many soggy, trampled dogwood petals on a dirty sidewalk. He's the only one not crying as the Fireman breathes flames into the audience and the Ringleader laughs cruelly from his pedestal on the swaying elephant's back. He's the only one not screaming in terror as the tigers leap through circles of fire and bound into the crowd and the masked clowns cackle and scream and hurdle into the stands with clubs and poisoned flowers. He's the only one who gets up calmly to leave, and ignores the cowering forms around him as he walks to the House of

_Mirrors._

_Mirrors are everywhere. The walls are covered with them: floor to ceiling, ceiling to wall, wall to corner, corner to infinity in a green glass bottle. There are thousands of green glass bottles, stretching so far into the backs of the mirrors that the light reflecting from them is bent by gravity and they disappear around the curvature of the earth._

_Mirrors are important now. Mirrors are important._

_Mirrors are Salvation. _

_Mirrors are Reality._

_You cannot put a mask on a mirror. A mirror cannot be masked._

_**A mirror cannot be masked**_

_A mirror _rests in the pocket of the Illusionist, but he won't take it out to look within it. He can't take it out to look within it. If he takes it out to look within it, the illusion will shatter like a delicate blown-sugar figurine atop a birthday cake.

Everything will shatter if he looks in the mirror. Everything will shatter. The Illusionist cannot shatter his mirrors or the Illusion will be lost.

He -_**cannot be masked**__- _wishes he had something besides trickery to hide behind.

People are crying and cowering and flames are licking the sides of the tent like feather-fingers only with dark hot heat and he has to leave because nothing is an illusion anymore, the illusions have become reality and they are emerging from the dark with gaping jaws open wide. The mirror shatters in his pocket as a paint-masked clown knocks him to the ground and he has to run and run and run and he only ends up back in the House of Mirrors and he sees himself standing there and there is no mask and no illusion and he can no longer hide as he stretches on to infinity where the gravity bends the light.

And all the mirrors _shatter._

_Shattering, shattering, everything is shattered._

_Don't panic._

_Don't panic._

_Don't panic._

_Don't _think too hard, the Acrobat thinks. Don't think too hard. Don't even think about not thinking too hard.

…It's impossible. But so is what she's about to do. So maybe there's no such thing as impossible. Is there no such thing? It would be nice, she thinks.

But probably impossible.

The Acrobat breathes deeply. She steps forward to the edge of her sky-high platform and tries to block out the terrified shrieks of the crowd below her. They are too preoccupied, she hopes, to notice her panicked eyes; they are too preoccupied to notice that the panicked eyes do not match the calm, still nature of her elegant, flexible body.

The trapeze swings before her, only slightly, the movement caused by the undulating heat produced by the panicking crowd below and the excited hordes of cackling clowns and manic flame breathers and stomping elephants.

She throws her arms upwards, pushes her chest out in the universal pose that means she is about to do something to make the crowd hold its breath if it were only paying attention.

She closes her eyes.

And she jumps into _infinity._

_In the end there was only ever infinity. Things were never as divided as they seemed, never so black and white as was imagined. In the beginning the Four stood inside the shattered house of mirrors and watched the colors reflecting in the broken pieces strewn about them and were reminded of the surface of a bubble. _

_A bubble resting on broken glass._

The Spectator watches as the mirrors shatter and the Illusionist falls to his unprotected knees and fixes his gaze on his own reflection in a shard of glass larger than the rest. He watches as the Acrobat falls from her trapeze and tumbles through the net in a flurry of sequined costume and long hair until she lands in the mirrors and her blood mixes with the Illusionist's.

He watches as the Author reaches for another page and slices her hand on a shard of mirror lodged in her typewriter.

He moves. He winds the page in himself, shoves the platen to the right, and feels his ankle grow warm as blood flows from a tear in his trousers on the lower part of his calf. The Illusionist cries. The Acrobat groans. The Author looks at him with wide, bloodshot eyes.

He places the Author's hands on the keys.

She stains them red as she types

_Scene 2: Infinity._

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**A/N: So that's the prologue. Don't worry, it isn't supposed to make much sense yet. But hopefully it intrigued you at least a little bit? **

**Let me know! The first of the Four will be introduced after next chapter. I'd tell you whether it was the Spectator, Illusionist, Acrobat, or Author, but that would take away all the fun :P**

**Review?**

**-h**


	2. Intro: Mirrors

**Introduction: Mirrors**

_For D.  
Because you'll never know._**  
**

There's a piece of all of us that wonders if any of it is real, what we observe in life. The laughter of children and the labored breathing of the elderly; the soft bottom lip of that _one_ person and the upturned nose of that _other_ one; the cold feeling of a knife resting in the palm of your right hand and the warm feeling of a smooth cheek flush against the palm your left…

We look to mirrors for the answers, have you noticed?

In the mornings when we press the razor to the flesh of our necks or trace the cosmetics brush across our cheekbones, we ask the mirrors. We glimpse ourselves then, staring back from behind the glass, and we wonder how we really feel. We wonder if the fluorine resting on our toothbrush will really whiten our teeth and if it's worth the barefoot trek across the cold wooden floor of the bedroom to the chest-of-drawers for socks.

_It'll be better than yesterday_, we tell ourselves. _Today will be better_.

When we come home in the evenings and wearily hang our cloaks on the hook by the door, running our hands over our faces, feeling the sandpapery stubble that's had all day to grow or the caked make-up that's had all day to absorb the oil from our pores, we look to mirrors. Always we look ghastly, the events of the day settling around us like a thin, viscous sheet of oil and painting dark circles beneath our eyes, flattening our hair to our foreheads in greasy sections or pulling tendrils from their clips and clinging to them like dew so that they frizz out and encircle our heads in a tangled halo of lethargy.

We turn the tap towards the little blue dot, cupping our hands beneath the cold water and splashing it over our faces. Opening our lungs in a gasp, we let the cold rivulets stream down our faces like water down the sides of a glass pouring-pitcher and trickle off our parted lips and the tips of our eyelashes and the ends of our trembling chins, and we try not to remember how redundant this all seems.

We hesitate for only a moment before we lift our heads slowly to stare at the wet hair framing our faces and the jaded eyes beneath half-hanging lids. We see a flash of something unbridled in our own irises and, for a moment, we wonder if we've finally found the answer.

But we blink and feel the droplets trickling down our necks and clinging to the underside of our stiff collars or the lacy edge of our undergarments, spreading out on the fabric like flower blossoms in fast time, and we are reminded that we are on the wrong side of the mirror. We press our foreheads against the cool glass and sigh.

_Today will be better_, we tell the fog of our breath. _Tomorrow will be better_.

We look away before we see the ones who would tell us we were wrong. There are four of them, two of each, and they are standing behind the looking glass, staring at us from the corners of our irises, the edges of our pupils, smirking.

They know. They know we shouldn't lie just because the truth makes us doubt.

We don't realize it, but we envy them.

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**A/N: I know, a prologue and and introduction? I never said this was a conventional sort of deal...**

**Next chapter starts answers Who questions...**

**-h**


	3. Reflection: Beginning, Part i

**Reflection: Beginning, Part i**

_For Time,  
Because maybe if I'm nice  
You'll lend yourself to me more often._

Theodore Nott's mother died before he was born.

Impossible yes, but the notion of impossibility was a bit skewed in the world of dark magic and blind ambition.

It had happened in her bedroom, the one across the sprawling manor from her husband's, and it had been the fault of a stray shard of glass, forgotten by the house elves the time Annabelle Nott had shattered the handheld mirror in her palms in a fit of what most deemed irrational despair, though she would beg to differ. Post-partem depression before the baby was born, they speculated…pre-partem depression. Was that even possible?

She was too disoriented to care. Her husband didn't care enough to notice. And the Healers noticed enough to realize that intervention could cost them far more than just a slightly blemished conscious and the moral battle felt within every time they pretended to turn a blind eye.

It got to be stifling for Annabelle, the despair; she was a woman wed to a man with no soul, pregnant with a child she felt sure would become a demon, a corporeal form of the winged, venomed claws of the loneliness that slashed so slowly at her heart, blowing icy breath into her veins and laying heavy granite eggs of helplessness in her stomach.

When she glimpsed herself in the jagged corner of the glass nestled into the ivory threads of the carpets of her bedroom, peaking out from beneath her vanity chair, she saw the corner of a letter slid partway beneath a door, waiting to be read like a poor man waits on the streetcorner for a few Knuts. There was no return address, but it had her name sprawled across the front in childlike print, red ink blotted at the beginning of every letter where the finger rested while the shape of that particular letter was carefully remembered. She knew it wasn't real, that her child was unborn, innocent still and unable to fathom the evil she knew, but she thought it a plea from him, requesting she allow him to remain safe in her womb, protected from the cold world of his father so that he couldn't be molded into something far more sinister than a letter addressed in blood.

Theodore knew none of this, of course, being that he was merely a negative two weeks old when it happened. So when his mother discovered the jagged mirror-piece beneath her vanity chair and used it to bite at the insides of her wrists and the underside of her jaw, he only knew that it got a bit colder inside his small dormitory and not that the white carpets of his mother's bedroom were steadily stained red as the blood flowed from her veins like the black waters of the river Styx.

It was concluded upon the discovery of her corpse that the baby within Annabelle Nott's womb was no longer living, as is only rational when an expecting mother dies before she gives birth, but Theodore lived for a day and a half inside his mother's cold body, his first accidental magic a product of necessity for survival rather than strong emotion. He was only removed when the mortician realized he was still, miraculously, alive. A bit of magic later, and he was blinking his eyes open for the first time, staring at the body of his dead mother in complete and total indifference, silent.

Shortly thereafter he was staring at the hard, sharp face of his father as the mortician presented the man his son. His father stared back at him for approximately twenty seconds before he called for a house elf, handed the baby off to the small creature, and told it to feed his namesake whenever he started crying. Theodore didn't cry at all the first day of his life, and the house elves had to press their hands against the stove and shut their heads in the pantry door as they warmed the milk they knew he needed despite his silence.

It was a depressing and lonely beginning to what most would consider a depressing and lonely lifetime, and as Theodore stared into the milky white eyes of the skeletal horse standing before him eleven years later, he suspected it might have been the reason he despised the human race to such an extreme.

The horse's eyes reminded him of the fog that clung to the buttresses of Nott Hall in the very small hours of the morning, when the fire in his room still burned slowly as he sat on the windowsill, his bed left neatly made and un-slept in behind him. Ghostlike faces molded themselves outside his window, flickering and smirking at him as he sat, and he hadn't realized they were all versions his own- older, younger, only a bit paler- until he saw the same ones reflected back at him from the murky depths of the horse's eyes.

The thestral he was standing before snorted and moved its head slowly so that it was facing the opposite direction, towards the lawns sloping up to the entrance of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Theodore caught a glimpse of a young girl with long brown curls and soft green eyes standing on the opposite side of the horse, staring through its head to Theodore's face and frowning slightly as if she were thinking about addressing him. He looked away from her before she had a chance and followed the lantern of the giant man leading them through the dark to the waiting rickety boats. He chose one slightly off to the side, whose own lantern was rocking slightly and creaking as it let out a dim light, and sat in the back of it, not sharing in the nervous chatter of the three other students around him.

Miracles, to Theodore, were much the same as impossibilities: he simply did not believe in them. And it would be a miracle for him to relate to the students musing about which house they would be in and how big the troll they would have to fight would be, instead of mulling over just exactly why his reflection in the fog of the thestral's eye seemed to be smirking at him ironically.

He mulled this over throughout his trek from the mossy underground chamber beneath the castle, all the way to the room outside the Great Hall, and from there up the aisle in the middle of the Great Hall itself, and onto the rickety stool at the front. He was still thinking about it when the tattered old hat was plopped on top of his head.

"Ah," a voice said in his ear, and Theodore didn't even flinch at the unexpected noise, instead staring at the inside of the hat indifferently. "Not one to let our emotions get the better of us, are we?"

Theodore made no response, out loud or no, besides to blink his eyes once and then resume his staring.

"Well," said the hat, "I think we both know to which house you belong, but I wonder…what choice will you make?"

Theodore couldn't help but to frown slightly at the hat's words, and it wasn't long after he did that there was a soft laugh in his ear and the hat said,

"You are wondering what choice I speak of, are you not?" It paused as if to allow Theodore time to respond, but continued on unanswered. "It's simple really. Merely a matter of will-power."

Theodore frowned once again but did not question the hat, as it seemed to wish of him. Instead, he shifted slightly on the hard stool and was then still once again. The hat laughed.

"Well, you do have patience, that's a thing. Good, for where you'll end up, should you choose that path, but I wonder if you will be willing to let others help you in your decisions…"

This time the hat got a bit more of a response, as Theodore snorted disdainfully, and turned his head as if to ignore any further words it had to say. Once again, the hat laughed.

"Ah yes, stubborn as well, aren't you? Well, no matter, these things tend to balance themselves out with time. For now, all I can do for you is to ask the one question that will help you discover why, exactly, you saw that reflection in the thestral's eyes."

The hat was gratified with more of a reaction this time, as Theodore sat up with more attention and frowned in surprise at the tattered leather in front of his eyes.

"What choice will you make, Theodore Nott? The easy one, the one with less bother attached, or the one that will take you through the dark, towards the unknown, with no guarantees as assured attachments?"

And with that, Theodore was left only to frown in wonder as the hat bellowed loudly, over the whisperings that were starting across the four tables, "SLYTHERIN!" and he was pushed towards the table at the far left of the Hall.

**A/N: So there's the first of the Four. Theodore Nott. Any ideas as to which he is: Author, Spectator, Illusionist, or Acrobat? I'm not telling. You'll know eventually.**

**On a different note, the prologue has been slightly changed. I was informed by darksworld on my Yahoo!Group that I spelled infinity wrong the entire time. I thought about claiming I meant to do it and there was a reason, but all I could think of was that I used four "i's" in the spelling and there are four main characters in this story, but that sounded weak even to me, so I'm shifting the blame instead. My calculus teacher in high school actually made us spell it "infiniti" and she wasn't one you argued with much. **

**But really, I was just being stupid. It has been changed. Thanks darksworld :)**

**Review?**

**-h**

**PS: Any guesses as to the rest of the four? I'll give you a hint…Malfoy isn't one of them, there are two girls left and a boy, none of them are original, and only one was mentioned in the books more than sparsely.**


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